drives home from work (though admittedly less white knuckling than they would've been before I had my new winter tires). Today it started snowing around noon (after snowing overnight), and it's just gotten worse as the day progressed. I was scheduled to work 2:00-7:15; before my store manager left, she oh so generously told me she cared about us and if the weather continued to be bad, we should leave at...7:00. For context, the store itself closes at 7:00 and you have 15 minutes to close out the registers and print various paperwork and then tell the system to shut down. On a good day, when we have no cash deposit, I can get us out of there by 7:05, and on bad days, we're still usually out by 7:12 or 7:13, so SM's offer really wasn't that generous. OTOH, our regional manager, who lives two towns away from me (mostly north, a little east), was dining tonight at a nearby establishment and called at 6:00 to see if we had any customers. I told her we hadn't seen a soul since 4:00 (which is often the case no matter what the weather), so she told us to go ahead and begin the closing process. As a result, we got out around 6:20, which was great since my drive home was almost twice as long as usual. The closer I got to home, the worse the roads (and the snowfall) got. By my town, roads were merely suggestions, and I was just trying to stay between the telephone poles. Once I left the gentle glow of our "downtown", I tried turning my headlights to "bright"...it was like Han Solo putting the Millennium Falcon in hyperdrive, so back to regular headlights it was! I was very grateful to get home without incident.
This is supposed to continue until some time Monday morning. We have a team dinner scheduled for tomorrow night at a restaurant within walking distance but we've already been told if the snow keeps falling (the temperature is supposed to fall as well), we might reschedule. Which will make me simultaneously happy and mad; happy because I didn't really want to go to this team dinner anyways, especially since we all have to pay for ourselves this year (last year, SM had a couple gift cards big enough to treat us all) and I really, REALLY don't want to go out in bad weather, and mad because I've been busting my behind this week making the mini Santa boots for my co-workers and don't want to think about all the free time I would've had if the team dinner isn't tomorrow night. Also, I know a few co-workers were planning on bringing cookies for everyone to take home and darn it, I want my Christmas cookies <g>!
